The Kissaway Trail

Breach - Fairly Good, Based on 4 Critics

PopMatters - 70Based on rating 7/10

70

Since the resurrection of My Bloody Valentine all manner of bands from across the globe and across the popular music genre landscape have been jumping on the shoegazer bandwagon, and why not? My Bloody Valentine totally rules. I know it, you know it, the friggin’ cat knows it. So did Slowdive, Ride and the Cocteau Twins for that matter. A great many of the bands that have been unimaginatively ripping off the sounds of those bands without stepping up to the plate in terms of songwriting, however, do not really rule that much.

It’s been three years since The Kissaway Trail’s second album, Sleep Mountain, and in that time, it’s fair to say they encountered a fair amount of internal strife since then. Losing a pair of founding members (their guitarist and bass player) could have seen the band implode, never to be seen again. Instead, the band has continued as a three-piece and has started to make moves towards being more widely acclaimed than they ever could have hoped for originally.

It's strange that a band with a core of only three members would evoke the sounds of sprawling acts like the Polyphonic Spree and the Arcade Fire, but that's exactly the kind of magic that Danish trio Kissaway Trail pull off on Breach. Elaborate and rhapsodic, the songs here feel like tiny, self-contained films that all happen to start right at the peak of the dramatic tension, as though you were flipping the channels on the television and every station happened to be playing that scene from Say Anything where John Cusack is holding up a boombox blasting some Peter Gabriel. Balancing this out is a dreamy murkiness, providing just enough uncertainty to Breach that it doesn't race forever upwards like an emotional rocket.

The Kissaway Trail. Roll the name about on your tongue and it tastes wistful. Since their 2007 self-titled debut full-length (a year after their self-released Into the Ocean and Rise Again EP) the Danish compatriots of Mew and Carpark North (to name but a few) have built their name on epic, sing-a-long choruses and musical themes of mountainous escape, childhood and similar notions.